Senior Backend Engineer (Data) 1

About the role

We're growing the team that keeps our data infrastructure running and our archive growing. This is hands-on work at the intersection of Python, Django, and databases at real scale.
You will:

-
Maintain and extend the hundreds of scrapers that continuously pull court data into our system

-
Ingest millions of documents and merge them safely into our production database

-
Help build and evolve the portal receiving our digitization work at the United States Library of Congress, where a team is scanning millions of pages

-
Convert scanned material into structured text and documents, and merge it into the archive without breaking what's already there

-
Work on the machine learning processes that identify and remove copyrighted material - a critical safeguard for a nonprofit like ours

-
Design batch operations that run across five to ten million records efficiently, without taking the databases down

-
Diagnose slow queries, review migrations, and be a person the team can rely on when something in the database needs a second pair of eyes

Hard requirements

Please don't apply if you don't have real experience in these areas:

- Python, professionally and at depth

-
Django - this is the framework we build on and the single most important skill for this role

-
Strong database experience. We run Postgres, but we care more about your fundamentals than the specific engine: you should be comfortable reading an execution plan, tracking down why a query is slow, reasoning about indexes, and handling migrations that don't go as planned

-
Web scraping - building, maintaining, and debugging scrapers in production

Nice to have

- Celery, Redis, Kubernetes

-
Machine learning applied to document processing (OCR, classification, extraction)

-
Experience with legal data, civic tech, govtech, or open data

- Elasticsearch or similar search infrastructure

-
A genuine interest in law, access to justice, or social justice work — it's what we do every day

Originally posted on Himalayas